Will AI MODE Become The Default Google Search? (James Dooley Interviews Charles Floate)

[00:00:00]Will AI mode become the Google default search engine? Today I'm joined with Charles Flo. Charles has done a lot of digging with regards to LLM optimization and AI SEO. And he's also got some great information with regards to AI mode. So, Charles, let's jump straight in. Is AI mode going to become the default search engine?

[00:00:24]>> Well, if you listen to Google's earning calls, then yes. They have been saying for a long time that they're looking to essentially move to this new search experience. So, have a a new search That's what they call it essentially, a new search experience. And from the earnings calls, they're trying to do that by Q4 of this year. So, Q4 2026.

[00:00:45]So, sometime between October and December 2026. Now, if you have been in the industry for as long as we have, right? I've heard Google make claims, and especially to investors, kind of make these grandiose ventures very early on. We all remember Google Glass. We all remember a bunch of these other things that they've kind of put out as these massive hype piece marketings, and none of them came to fruition. Even the um click-to-call, so the the AI call functionality that they had a few years ago, that never released, even though they were saying that was coming Q4 of that year. So, there's a lot of what Google says and a lot of what becomes reality. With that being said, from what they're doing in this case, they are trying to position the algorithm and the um user interface in a way that AI mode, at least the majority of people are going to be exposed to it. If it isn't the default, then so far already, the majority of people have have been exposed to it in some capacity. And they are trying to create that experience and prepare people for when that experience becomes the default. Now, do I think AI mode, AI overviews, that kind of thing, is going to be the experience when that does become the default? Probably not, because I think that Google's going to make innovations and changes before that experience becomes the default and it will look very different to how it looks now, anyway.

[00:02:06]>> So, I'm going to I'm going to give you a few different questions here. So, let's role-play. Charles Floate, you're sat at the top of the table with all the Google engineers and they say, "Charles, it's up to you how you play out with AI mode or Gemini AI overviews. What would you do personally? If you're sat at the top of the table and the buck stops with you, what would you do with regards to Google Search? Would you make it default as per AI mode or what would you be doing with the Google Search results?"

[00:02:38]>> I think I'd probably still be forced into the same position that a lot of the engineers and a lot of the leadership is, which is still going to be forced to follow what the shareholders ultimately want and what the ultimate company vision is. Now, the new company vision that Google has is this AI in ecosystem environment where it's Gemini everything, right? Like we've seen there's like 900 different co-pilots from Microsoft. The same kind of thing's happening with Google Gemini. They're rolling it out into basically every kind of system and and everything kind of that they can in that ecosystem. I think that's going to likely continue.

[00:03:15]Um with it in if I was the if I was in control of everything, I would look at what the user experience is saying, right? So, what do users actually want to see? And as a really good example of this, I look at stock ticker searches.

[00:03:31]And the new AI overview stock ticker searches is a text box about the actual stock. So, it might say the current market cap, all of these details and things, but it's in a text box.

[00:03:41]Previously, the featured snippet or the search feature that you used to get would be an interactive chart experience that you can actually see and interact with and see and drag down the chart and see the historical data for that stock.

[00:03:53]See additional elements of data and interact with that. I think that previous experience was actually better for most people who are looking up stock charts who want to actually engage with the historical chart than it is the new AIO views. I think for informational searches and for other bits and pieces there's definitely places where AIO views are going to be better.

[00:04:16]But is that AIO experience going to be better than the calculators that you get? Is it going to be better than the flight experience that you already get?

[00:04:23]Is it going to be better than the maps experience that you already get? All of those kind of things. I think that there's a lot of elements that actually the user experience is fundamentally better at that at the existing level than the AIO views at their current level can achieve.

[00:04:38]In the future, Google's looking at trying to do this kind of custom dynamic interactive app experience where it tries to tailor specific elements of the UX and UI and things to individual users. That could be awesome or it could create stuff that is completely unnecessary and doesn't actually fulfill what the user is really looking for.

[00:05:00]>> Yeah, for sure. I think for me personally, I think Google does actually a good job with regards to and I know I rarely say that as well by the way, but I think Google does a good job where someone's searching for a certain keyword like kitchen remodeling. It knows from previous searches and user experience that people want images. So right at the very very top of Google brings a load of images. If you do like how to boil an egg, it knows that a lot of people are looking for videos and a short video for how to boil an egg and stuff like that. And I feel like some informational based queries that I think AI mode would be the best kind of system for them to be showing. I feel that they might go default AI mode for certain queries, but then I also think for other queries they might not. When it needs a calculator, maybe if if people start clicking off the AI mode to some of the other tabs if that's allowed. I don't know whether it will be allowed or not. I I don't know how they're going to set it up, but I feel they've got to the are the so-called a user experience first platform. And if they do allow people to click off and do click on to maps, click on to videos, click on to images, at that point they might start saying, "Hey, wait. This is not what people want." So, it might not be for all queries. But, it's just interesting. Obviously, they've said in Q4 they might be going default AI mode.

[00:06:20]So, what What do you think? I asked you what you would do. What do you think?

[00:06:25]Like, let's say they are on time and let's say in November this year they're going to do what they've said they're going to do and AI mode's going to become the default. How do you think that's going to look? And what do you think they're going to do if if they say they're going to do what they say they're going to do?

[00:06:42]>> I I think the the end goal from all of this innovation of what Google are trying to achieve here is to keep users inside Google's ecosystem. So, it's actually to stop clicks going out. It's to try and reinforce this zero-click strategy that they've been having way way way before this kind of AI hype and technology and all these innovations and stuff came out. We experienced this, you know, 5 years before ChatGPT ever launched. Google were trying to consolidate the clicks in and their own portfolio, their own projects, their own investments, and their corporate partnerships.

[00:07:14]But, with the actual default experience, I think so far it will probably be more in trying to keep them in that ecosystem with some sort of a split view where you can have the search on the left-hand side and you can open pages or the interactive apps or something on the right-hand side. And they already do that with Google Chrome where you can have split view tabs. And I would hedge a pretty accurate guess that they're probably going to do that with the AI mode experience. So, everyone's going to still be in Google's ecosystem on the left-hand side, but browsing is going to be done on the right-hand side, but they can still claim that all of that minute spent inside of the app is still technically inside of Google's own ecosystem.

[00:07:53]>> With regards to that then, with regards to AI mode, and with regards to what's going on, there's two this I feel like there's two lanes with Google. They've got the share ownership and making certain they're making profit, and it's all about the profit, and they're a business run. But then they are trying to make it that it's good for the users cuz they don't want to use lose users to elsewhere to chat GPT and other places.

[00:08:14]So, they're trying to make it good for the users, but obviously predominantly they want to make more profit as a business.

[00:08:21]How does that fan out where if they want to spend longer inside of Google?

[00:08:26]Obviously, they make majority of the money via PPC, so buy clicks through to websites. Do you not feel that it could be that they're trying to keep you on longer when it's for informational top of the funnel keywords where people aren't willing to bid on PPC, get them down the funnel faster, but then present them with brands that are willing to bid on more bottom of the funnel type queries? Like just funnel them faster to their ads. Do you think it could be for that, or they're trying not to send them at all off to the websites? If they're not trying to send them off to the websites and keep them on Google, how do they earn their money by just keeping them on Google without going through to the website?

[00:09:05]>> So, that there's in terms of the the two competing sides in Google, right? We saw if you've read the article The Man That Killed Google, right? I don't know if you've seen the article. It's by Ed Edward Zion, I believe. He did a fantastic job of breaking down essentially. There was a bunch of search quality purists, and they were led by Ben Gomes, who was the previous head of search for Google. And he was very much so pushing for search quality experience, anti-malware, all of that kind of stuff that has a very actually negative experience, and potentially not just negative experience, but negative connotations for people's livelihoods or their actual lives in in a whole picture.

[00:09:44]He was very much so pushed in that direction. However, the camp that was kind of putting this code yellow and code red on that kind of stuff had more deeper connections to the ads department and the monetization side of things, and that kind of sway where the profit-driven decision-making inside of a corporation is going to overpower the user quality decision-making all day long. And I do think to some degree they have a level of arrogance when it comes to, well, people are just going to Google it.

[00:10:14]It's become such a colloquial used term amongst the masses of every country in the world almost that it they know that they won't lose huge amounts of their ecosystem and user base because they're so integrated into it. They they use YouTube daily, they use Google Search daily, they use Gmail daily, they use Google Calendar, they use Google Photos, they use Gemini, they use Android. Like, all of these things are just connecting them back to Google, and that's allowing Google to continuously force adoption into their new AI integration or their new AI tools as well.

[00:10:45]>> So, with regards to the way I'm old, is there anything that you're going to be trying to Are you working on anything now differently thinking that Q4 AI mode's going to be coming along? Do you think that people are missing a trick now in trying to optimize ahead of the game for AI mode? What is it that you're trying to do? What do you see the future with regards to the way I'm old?

[00:11:06]>> So, AI mode is far more personalized than people realize, and there's been a bunch of really interesting testing. So, I don't know how much you follow the iPullRank guys, like Mike King and Garrett Sussman and things like that.

[00:11:18]They did a bunch of testing with profound recently, and SimilarWeb, I believe, was also involved in the partnership, where they created four personas over the course of 12 months, and it was 180,000 to 200,000 prompts between all of these four personas that they ended up putting through Google AI mode and that AI overviews. And almost every single prompt that they put in, even if it was the verbatim the same word prompt, the outputs, even the recommendations of the brands for the outputs in the of the AI mode, would be vastly different depending on the persona asking. So, a very good example was which bank should I go with, right?

[00:11:55]And as a middle-aged plumber, they were getting Chase recommended. As a freelancer, they were getting a bank recommended more towards freelancers. As a multi-millionaire, they were getting one that was more tuned towards financial management and capital investments and things like that. So, it very much so changed the output just based on the personalization. So, that layer alone is a new layer that is far, far more integrated and far different from what we've already had to kind of tune attune ourselves to. So, previously, any personalization that we had was mostly locally and kind of sourced towards their account. And the personalization wasn't taken into account this huge user identity profile and history of interactions, at least not to the degree that Gemini has the understanding for. And it allows that personalization layer, like I said, to massively affect the actual outputs.

[00:12:45]Now, when you're trying to tune to that, there are some tactics that you can do.

[00:12:50]And actually, a lot of the personalization is being pulled from your email inbox and things like that. So, email marketing becomes way, way more important to especially for target users that are actually going to be picking up your brand in AI mode.

[00:13:02]When it comes to the actual placements, previously, old school traditional SEO for the last 25 years has been one website, you're going to do your content, you're going to do your links, and your technical SEO. That's basically it, right? Nowadays, your website is maybe 5% of the picture when you're trying to optimize for AI mode. It's mostly third-party sources, third-party listicles, mentions, references, non-commodity content, commodity content, all of this kind of stuff, but it is way, way, way broader in terms of the amount of content needed to be created, and it is way it's a million X in the amount of content needs to be distributed, and it needs to be distributed on the correct sources that the AI is being is picking up and referencing, and those sources might change over time as well. So, it's going to be a very, very different career path to how SEO has been for the last kind of 25 years just on the basis that we're no longer primarily focusing on the brand domain itself, but how we are viewed and the sentiment that the brand is viewed on the wider web.

[00:14:05]>> Yeah, for sure. Anyone who's watching this, do you think that AI mode is going to become the default search engine?

[00:14:11]Would you be happy if AI mode becomes the default search engine? Leave a comment in the comment section. Make sure you go and check out the next episode where me and Charles talk about optimization strategies specifically to help you get a better LLM visibility in Google AI mode. Charles, it's been an absolute pleasure.